"Don't feel bad, most species of large mammal die off ... it's just our turn."
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Dr Herb Ruhs is The Compassionate Misanthrope "Don't feel bad, most species of large mammal die off ... it's just our turn." |
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Adding up the American horrors by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News Dec. 5, 2008 Thursday's Democracy Now program featured several echoes of the intense depravity of US war-making doctrine as it has been pursued over the last half century. Cluster bombs, nearly universally condemned, even by the puppet government of Afghanistan, are stubbornly defended as a necessity by the US. Workers and soldiers are wantonly exposed to deadly chromium by KBR (aka Halliburton) in Iraq. After years of depraved denial "a congressionally-mandated committee has concluded that “Gulf war syndrome” is a legitimate condition that continues to affect one quarter of the nearly 700,000 US soldiers deployed in that war." And finally, the war crime that never stops giving, the exuberant spraying of Agent Orange, is having another day in court as victims try to seek just
The final item in this list of horrors of US war-making is of particular importance to me personally. When I lived in the small refugee village of Vinh Son near the First Division US Army Headquarters in Phu Loi, Viet Nam, between 1966 and 1969, we would often find ourselves drenched with Agent Orange as the planes and helicopters would return to base and empty their tanks on the approach to the runway, which just happened to lie just over our village. I, the dumb American, was particularly vulnerable to these dumps as I would more often be caught out in the open when they occurred. My fellow villagers, being more wise to the ways of war, would anticipate the showers and seek cover. I remember the frustration of trying to clean this stuff off of my body with the small amounts of water available to us to bathe, bathing out of a cup essentially, because the Agent Orange was so sticky. Since that time I have had three cancers, chronic recurrent intestinal inflammation, skin problems and early onset diabetes, all attributable to the exposure. Truly, Agent Orange is a gift that keeps on giving. The blessing is that I had the luck to father three children free of birth defects. Our military establishment, and the plutocracy that it serves, is demonstrably the worst agent of war criminality in modern history. If the Nazis had had a few more decades of opportunity they might have won the prize. But adding up the horrors... ... the strategic bombing, including the use of atomic weapons, of civilian populations in WWII, ... the civilian deaths, exemplified by the massacre at No Gun Ri in Korea, ... the US financed French war in Indochina and the subsequent American war, with its carpet bombing and free fire zones, its Agent Orange and the Phoneix Program death squads, ... the US sponsored wars in Central America, the US sponsored Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980 with more than a million dead, ... the First and Second Gulf Wars and the deadly embargo that resulted in the deaths of a million or more Iraqis, mainly children, ... the many US sponsored wars and military coups in Africa, South America and Asia, most notably the Indonesian experiences of the overthrow of Sukarno, the invasion of East Timor, and the sponsorship of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, ... the wars in the former state of Yugoslavia, ... the accumulating deaths due to the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the future, never ending toll from the use of uranium munitions in those countries, ... from all this it can be plainly seen that the US military and diplomatic establishment has by now far outpaced the Nazis, who have been relegated to second place status in the contest for greatest modern war criminal state. As a result primarily of the image of the heroic rescue of so many nations from Fascist domination during WWII, the US government has been able to perpetrate this long litany of war crimes under the cloak of innocence and good will. The sheep's clothing is now being torn from the hungry wolf, and the true depraved nature of the imperialist war-mongering of the US plutocrats is now becoming apparent to the world. Better late than never. © by the author.
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